In this part of my tutorial on how to create a WordPress Featured Content Slider I’ll cover many topics.

I’ll show you how to:

Count the Number of Posts in a Category

Create Custom WordPress Queries

Pull Post Titles, Excerpts, Links, etc.

Use Tim Thumb to Shrink Images

All of the code used in this tutorial follows the video. Use it however you’d like. I also show you how to use Tim Thumb below and provide the script.

How to Use Tim Thumb

I use the script Tim Thumb to turn my featured content image into a thumbnail. You can get the script here Tim Thumb Script. Just copy the script and change the extension from txt to php. Then follow these steps:

Save the script in a folder called timthumb

Create a folder named cache in that same folder

Save the timthumb folder in your main theme folder in WordPress

Change permissions on the cache and timthumb folder to 777

To turn an image into a thumbnail you can execute timthumb by passing it the image to shrink, height, weight and give a variable named zc the value of 1 like this.